Some scattered notes from Sean Wilentz's talk on his new book, The Age of Reagan that focus on his somewhat unusual periodization choice in which the age runs from 1974-2008: “long, prolonged era of conservative political domination of American political life” “last 35 years or so have seen conservative politics dominant in national political life” “a lot of the history that had been written of this period was locked in hagiography or demonology” “possible as a historian to lay aside one’s political views and write as a historian” “not the conventional periodization beginning in 1968” “1974, with the fall of Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal” “regardless of who wins the presidency we’re at the end of a political era” “the disruption of American politics as we had known it since at least 1945” “people tend to forget how demoralized the Republican establishment was in 1974 . . . there was talk of changing the party’s name” “Republicans were increasingly divided between a beleaguered establishment and a new post-Taft conservative movement coming out of the west”
“indisputable that Ronald Reagan was the major political figure in American politics during this period” “many efforts to try to put the center back into American politics, Jimmy Carter tried and failed . . . George H.W. Bush . . . the center-right wouldn’t hold . .. Bill Clinton . . . could not recreate the center-left, the terms of politics had been transformed”
Periodization strikes me as an intrinsically problematic task for a historian. Nobody's better-positioned to recognize that these are semi-arbitrary and yet it's the historial who needs to actually write books and that positively requires you to pick beginning and end points.
| 
Heads in the Sand
Periodization is (or should be) heuristic. Yes, it's semi-arbitrary, but I hope that's in the sense of arbitration rather than capricious. We can debate what a periodization claim means in context. Does 1974 make sense in terms of national electoral politics? Wilentz's claim makes a certain amount of sense there. For electoral politics, I suppose it depends on whether you think the axis of a period revolves around specific politicians (e.g., Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, Bush II) or around larger party structures.
On that point, it might make better sense to see Reagan as a rallying point rather than the only piece that's relevant. But if that's true, I suspect other historians will argue that 1964 is the true start of the Reagan Era.
Posted by Sherman Dorn | July 1, 2008 10:39 AM